


Many, Beautiful Things

by lesbianophelia



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - No Hunger Games, Arranged Marriage, District Four, Eventual Romance, Everyone Is Gay, F/F, Falling In Love, LGBTQ Themes, Lesbian Character of Color, Mail Order Brides, No Lesbians Die, Panem, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 13:38:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15292707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianophelia/pseuds/lesbianophelia
Summary: "Remembering those thingsWe did in our youth……Many, beautiful things…" -- Sappho.(District Four AU -- no hunger games, Lesbian!Everlark, a mail order bride fic as it should be written, with no power imbalances and without romanticizing sex trafficking.)





	Many, Beautiful Things

  
Chapter One:  **  
**  


Patricia Mellark starts May eighth the way she starts every day -- her body wakes her the half-hour before her alarm goes off, ready to take a pill from the little orange bottle that waits upside down on her bedside table, unmoved from where she left it eight hours ago. She tries, sometimes, to wait it out. To see if she might be able to go back to sleep without the help. But this morning, she doesn’t even bother trying. 

 

She was up late enough last night to know that the drowsiness from the palmful of prescription medicine she takes every night was never going to hit. She spent her evening cleaning the apartment, but planned to save the bathroom for the next morning. Only, she kept thinking about the floor of the walk-in, and how badly she wanted it to look nice. 

 

So she knelt, though it felt like all hell even on her good knee, and scrubbed at the floor of her walk-in shower, and then braced herself against the bar on the wall and washed her hair, another thing she planned to do in the morning.    
  


Though she knows, rationally, that she’s prepared as much as she could, she still thinks over the list of things she has to do today as she she rolls the sock for her prosthetic onto her leg and makes her way out to the kitchen. Clean sheets wait, folded on the padded bench at the end of the bed, ready to be fitted against the mattress. Her coffee waits out in front of her seat at the table, ground already and scooped out into the little paper filter that’s held aloft above her pale green mug. It almost matches the electric kettle that waits, already filled with water, but not exactly. It’s just a shade off, close enough that she bought it anyway, but not so close not to bother her just a little.    
  
She pours the water over the grinds, first, and goes to stand in front of the bathroom mirror while she waits on her coffee. Her fingers are just a little clumsy as she pins her hair into place. Nerves, not inexperience. She’s practiced this plenty of times, the milkmaid braid her aunt wore in her hair the day she married her wife. It wraps around her head twice, like a laurel framing her face. It has the added benefit, she learned the first day she wore her hair like this to work, of keeping her curly hair off of the back of her neck.    
  
She can’t help but to wonder today about her aunt. What she might think, were she here to see this. The watch she gave her rests heavily against her thigh. Patricia probably would be able to get in contact with her aunt’s wife, if she really wanted to. There’s so much risk, though, in finding a Mellark -- even just through marriage -- and telling them what name she goes by now. Where to find her. What she’s done. It’s better not to think about it. 

  
  


Patricia Mellark -- Peeta, as she’ll introduce herself in just a matter of a couple of hours -- sits at the kitchen table, doubting, not for the first time, whether her choice of outfit for today was just a bit too much. It’s the same sort of pants she usually wears to work, but in white. The legs are loose and white -- the closest thing to a skirt that exists in her wardrobe. She owns five pair, all told, but hasn’t worn the white ones before, other than to try them on. Patricia wonders, sipping at her coffee -- light with cream, as she always drinks it -- if this isn’t all too much. Save for the suspenders and the platform heel of her shoe, she’s dressed all in white. Like a bride. 

  
Maybe it’s that thought, or maybe it’s that by the end of today, the seat across from hers at the table will -- at last -- be occupied, but something about the whole thing feels so ridiculous that she shakes her head at herself. She’s gone and gotten herself married, anyway, so she might as well wear white. 

 

. . . 

 

Though she left the house a near two hours earlier than she needed to, Peeta worries, as the trolley pulls to an unsteady stop, about what it might look like if she’s late. She takes the stairs just a little bit too quickly, doesn’t quite grap the handrail tightly enough, and comes to a sprawling land on the platform. 

 

She’s just hoping that it’s early enough that no one was around to see it when a tiny pair of legs enter her vision. 

 

“Mama! Mama, she fell,” the child is saying, tugging at their mother’s hand. Peeta swallows thickly, trying to figure out what she can grab hold of to right herself. The mother shuffles, hiking her bag up to her shoulder rather than the crook of her elbow, and offers Peeta a hand that she wishes desperately she didn’t need to take. 

 

“Thank you,” Peeta murmurs once she’s on her feet, cheeks hot, leg already throbbing. 

 

“She’s bleeding,” the child points out, and just as the mother turns, maybe about to gently admonish, Peeta manages a smile.

 

“Aw, I’m fine,” she says, pulling the handkerchief from her shirt pocket and blotting at what’s, yes, definitely blood on the heel of her hand. “See? All better.”    
  
The child looks at their mother, maybe not believing, and Peeta really does manage to smile this time. 

 

“Thank you for finding me,” she says. “I might have been there forever if no one stopped.” An exaggeration, sure, but one that makes the child smile proudly. 

 

“She’s a helper,” the mother informs Peeta, and there’s something about it -- the tone of her voice, maybe, or the way she looks at her child -- that makes Peeta’s chest feel uncomfortably tight. 

 

“Well, um, I should go -- wash these,” she nods down at her hands, which probably won’t need bandaging or anything, but do provide a welcome excuse for an exit. “Thank you, again,” she says, to the mother or the child, she isn’t sure.    
  
“Hey --” the mother stops her before she can actually make for the restrooms. “Careful, okay?”    
  
There’s that heat in her cheeks again. “Yes, ma’am,” she says. “Have a good rest of your day.” 

  
  


A glance at the stopwatch in her pocket assures her that she has plenty of time -- more than that, even -- to right herself. She washes her hands and then inspects the dust on her pants -- just near her shins, really. She’s lucky the fabric didn’t tear, or her knee didn’t start to bleed through the fabric. Though, of course, the pain will come later. She thinks of the little amber bottle that waits for her at home, in the top drawer of her bedside table, and resolves that she’ll need to take one later if she wants to be even remotely functional tonight. Only, she probably can’t get away with hiding out in the shower for an hour and a half between taking the pill and bringing her wife out tonight. 

 

  
The train arrives early, but only marginally, really, and she’s already settled herself in one of the benches when her phone buzzes with the notification that it’s going to arrive half an hour earlier than scheduled. The hour ticks by treacherously slow, but, as she reasons with herself, she’s waited this long, hasn’t she? Not just this morning, either. 

 

Though she worried at times it might kill her, she waited through the recommended courtship period, a year -- thirty three letters, not that anyone other than Peeta has been counting. So many times, at the mention of something like a sixteen hour workday at the factory, she imagined just asking if she could buy a train ticket early. But it’s traditional to write letters for a year before any living arrangements are even discussed, and when Peeta pushed that etiquette by joking about just waiting for help deciding on curtains for her bedroom, she was rewarded with a record two weeks of silence. 

 

So she waited. She didn’t offer up the train tickets she always had waiting, in case her penpal mentioned, even in passing,that she might like to come out to District Four early. But just past the year mark, she got one of two of the shortest letters of all.

 

_ Are you going to invite me out to Four, or am I supposed to invite myself?  _ _  
_ _ -Katniss  _

 

No hello or goodbye, It could have been written on a sticky note. 

 

Peeta’s response was as short as she could make it. Just  _ I thought you’d never ask  _ and the voucher she bought months ago, ready to be traded in for a first class ticket to District Four. 

 

Katniss booked the trip for her birthday, less than a month later, and sent her confirmation papers in the mail the next day with the second of the short letters. 

 

_ I’ll wear a blue dress.  _

  
  


Peeta has waited this long. So she feels exceedingly stupid at the way her heart pounds in her chest in just those last few moments before the train doors hiss open. 

 

The crowd spills out and she stands, moving just a few steps out of the way, thinking every time she catches a flash of blue that maybe -- what if? -- could it be? None of them are dresses, and, more importantly, none of them are Katniss. She’s just thinking, heart in her throat, about how she’s being stupid. That there’s no reason she would be able to see her coming when she’s never so much as seen a picture of the woman she’s gone and  _ married _ .    
  
But then --    
  
Oh. 

 

It’s her.   
  
It must be. Her dress is blue, just as she promised, and barely seems to fit her at all. The material bunches in some places and threatens to hang off of her completely, though it probably isn’t helped any by her posture. And then there’s the mask -- big and black and strapped to her face, obscuring her nose and mouth. She’s read some about the air quality back in District Eight, but she didn’t even consider that her wife may not trust the air in Four. 

 

She’s crouched down just in front of the train doors, and though Peeta can’t see her mouth at all thanks to the mask, she can tell that Katniss is speaking intently and quietly to a girl who can’t be older than maybe four. Peeta thinks of the child she saw earlier, and how they clutched their mother’s hand. What is this one doing without a parent? Her stomach gives a little somersault when Katniss takes their hand. Wouldn’t Katniss have mentioned it sooner if she had a kid?

 

Peeta watches Katniss, her heart sinking, just a little, as her eyes search the crowd and don’t so much as land on her face. But then the child lets go of her hand, and Katniss crouches forward, clearly trying to catch the child, but they run headlong towards a man with a riot of red curls and a flash of facial hair. Peeta thinks she might even recognize him, and tries to place where as his gaze follows the girl’s hand to Katniss and he steps forward, clearly thanking her. Katniss waves her hand, and he makes some joke that earns him a hand-wave in return. But then, once he and his daughter are gone, her eyebrows furrow with what couldn’t be described as happy determination, and she hikes her bag up and looks out into the crowd again. 

 

Peeta raises her hand, this time, three fingers twitching in an approximation of a wave. She can feel all the weight of Katniss’s eyes on her, especially as the train roars away and Katniss shifts closer, but only by about an inch. Though she hates admitting it even just to herself, if Peeta hadn’t known to look for the blue dress, she would have missed her entirely. Not because she isn’t beautiful. She  _ is _ . But now that she’s here, she looks more like she belongs in District Four than Peeta does. Peeta sticks out like a sore thumb here, all pale and pink and blonde. 

  
But not Katniss. Katniss isn’t even just beautiful. She’s radiant, and she looks like she belongs here, like she could have been here this whole time, with her rich brown skin and the long black braids that she’s twisted up against her scalp. Peeta had wondered, though not exactly worried, considering the welcome she’s been given by the people in Four that she’s met so far, if Katniss would feel the need to explain herself. Only, now she realizes the only question is how Katniss doesn’t have a string of broken hearts back in District Eight to protest her leaving.    
  


And -- fuck -- her eyes, they’re not blue, like she suspected at first. They’re grey, but there’s something else there, too, something like green or blue or the illusion of both and neither. Like light coming through seaglass. 

 

Yes. That’s exactly what it is. 

  
“Welcome,” she chokes. There’s more. She practiced it in the shower every night for the last week and a half, and again last night and this morning while she brushed her teeth. But all she can get out is -- “Welcome to District Four.”    
**  
** Peeta’s arms feel hollow as the woman in front of her stares, eyes squinting in clear appraisal. What if she doesn’t like what she sees? What if she’s come all this way expecting something --  _ someone  _ \-- different?    
  
“Can I--?” she starts to ask, just as Katniss announces,   
  
“You’re tall.”    
  
Tall. Peeta coughs. Of everything her wife could have been deciding was worth pointing out about her, this is likely the least awful.    
  
“It’s, ah, the shoes,” she jokes, and, of course, Katniss’s eyes drop to her feet. 

 

Peeta curses herself inwardly for drawing attention to her legs so early. She’s played the odds as well as she could, in terms of hiding the prosthetic, and has since before she left the Capitol. Wide legged, flowing pants with closed toed shoes elevated on more of a platform than a heel. She owns each piece of today’s outfit four times over, mostly in blacks and greys. And then there’s today’s outfit -- so white,  _ too  _ white, with the red lift on the black shoes.    
  
“No.” It’s short. Decisive. “You never mentioned you were tall.” It’s a little accusatory, even muffled from the mask, but Peeta can tell it’s accidental.    
  


_ You never mentioned being so pretty, so I think we’re even _ , she thinks, but decides not to say. “Slipped my mind,” she says instead, and she means to sound casual, but her voice is weird and croaky. “Can I take your bag?”    
  
Katniss’s eyes narrow. Like Peeta is implying something, offering to carry it. 

 

“I’m stronger than I look,” she jokes. “I can take a turn.”    
  
“Fine,” she relents at last, handing it over.    
  
As they head for the elevator, Peeta tries not to stare. Really, she does, but it’s so hard, having Katniss right here and not watching every little movement. She’s thought about this -- about  _ her --  _ for so long, and never had anything even remotely resembling a mental image of her in her mind.    
  


“Let’s get you home,” she says, voice a little more quiet than intended, and when Katniss’s eyes snap up to her, she forces herself to smile, hoping it looks warm rather than phony. 

 

. . .    
  
  
“Happy birthday, by the way,” Peeta says as she leads Katniss to the elevator into their apartment. She actually reaches the breezy tone she’s hoped for and missed the last few times she’s opened her mouth. “I hope you weren’t too cooped up on the train.”    
  
“You remembered my birthday,” Katniss says, instead of answering, and Peeta goes to brush a curl of hair away from her ear that isn’t there, since she braided it up this morning.    
  
“You made it easy on me,” she says, as if May Eighth wasn’t already etched into her brain from last year, when Katniss mentioned it almost exactly three weeks after the fact. “Showing up today, I mean.” 

 

It’s been so quiet, as they loaded into the backseat of a cab that dropped them off right where the trolley would have -- if Peeta felt at all right about putting Katniss on another train. All of the things she had imagined herself saying to her wife seem so silly, now that she’s here. 

 

Katniss leans back against the far wall of the elevator. “I just didn’t want to work on my birthday again,” she admits, her voice somehow even quieter than it was before. 

 

Peeta wants to tell her that she never has to work on her birthday again. That she doesn’t have to ever work again if she doesn’t want to. But that would be too much, too fast, and Katniss already looks a little unsure about having someone else hold her bag, which seems to be two separate bags seamed together. 

 

In fact, all of Katniss’s outfit looks seamed together, now that Peeta is looking at it. She didn’t notice it earlier, but half of the front of Katniss’s dress is knit, and though the shades of blue on her skirt very nearly match, they don’t exactly. And one side is longer than the other, anyway. Her boots, too, look like maybe the last time they saw better days was before either of the women were born. They’re held together not just with duct tape but also gigantic staples and, apparently, something that looks like fishing line. 

  
“No work today,” Peeta says after just a moment or two too long. She’s saved from having to find something more eloquent to say when the elevator doors slide open, at last, right into the living room. She watches anxiously as Katniss takes in the apartment for the first time -- it’s the first place that’s ever been truly her own, and she spent months piecing it together into something that seemed like a place someone might actually live. 

 

The elevator doors open straight into the living room -- something that’s actually an accessibility standard, but that Peeta hopes Katniss will assume is the case on every apartment. Just to the side of the elevator doors stands a little two-legged table that holds her mail. She hangs her keys on one of the hooks just above it. 

 

“The other one is for you,” she says, motioning towards the set of keys on the second hook. “I didn’t realize you’d have so many pockets.”    
  
She can’t tell, with the mask, if Katniss thinks she’s even remotely funny.    
  
The living room isn’t particularly big -- but then, nothing in the apartment is. Just a light gray two-cushioned sofa with a cotton blanket that feels more like a bedsheet folded and draped over one arm and a coffee table just in front of it.    
  
“This is the living room, kitchen’s over that way,” she tilts her head towards the combined kitchen-dining room, which, while being one of her favorite parts of the house, can’t really be all that interesting to Katniss. “And the bedroom’s just through here.”    
  


Katniss trails behind her as she carries the bag into the bedroom, which is fine, because she needs the space as she hauls it up and sets it on top of the high dresser.    
  
“I took the top row of drawers,” she says. “The rest are all yours, though. And plenty of space in the closet, too, if you need it.”    
  
Katniss nods, eyes flashing around the room to take it in. The windows are open, enough to make the white curtains Peeta bought billow out around the bed, which is made up with soft blue seats and a comforter so light grey it’s practically just off-white. The bathroom is attached with a white door on one side of the room, and on the other is a slatted door that leads to the generously sized closet. The table on Katniss’s end of the bed is identical to Peeta’s, though it holds no prescription drugs or carefully sorted letters, and on top of it sits an orchid in a white vase.    
  
And then there’s the bookshelf. On the wall nearest to her side of the bed and near the closet. Big enough that she had it custom made, five long shelves, as tall as her, but only starting at around her waist, with space underneath it for storage. Each one is filled with books -- all that she had to pack, when she left home. All that she wanted to bring with her, from the Capitol. Fiction and nonfiction, and books and books and books about art.    
  
Katniss is staring at it. Eyes narrowed, like she’s making up her mind or something. Peeta’s heart, which hasn’t been particularly steady since she lugged the suitcase up on top of the dresser, won’t quiet down. 

 

“I -- ah --” she says, sitting at the end of the bed. “I just realized I don’t know if you like to read.”    
  
Katniss’s eyes finally move from the bookshelf to Peeta. Her face scrunches some -- what Peeta can see of it, at least. Peeta digs her fingernails into her palm and thinks,  _ fuck _ , and  _ stupid _ , and  _ when would she have had time to read?  _   
  
Only, then Katniss finally says, so softly Peeta might have missed it, “It’s all I like.”    
  
As if to prove her point, she tugs at the zipper on her duffle bag and digs through it again. Peeta isn’t trying to stare, but much of the contents seem to be just heaps of fabric. At last, she digs out what she’s looking for and drops it onto the bed beside Peeta triumphantly.    
  
“May I?” asks Peeta, and Katniss nods, leaning with her back against the dresser. 

  
Product manuals. Peeta picks one up gingerly -- there’s nothing to protect it, and the paper is already ripped and crinkled enough for her to worry about ruining it completely. There’s another one underneath it, this one marked up in a few places on the first page. While it’s not exactly what Peeta was talking about when she mentioned reading, it’s clear that these stapled-together pages are important to Katniss.    
  
“Can I show you some of my favorites?” she asks, gathering the pages into a neat stack when she stands and setting them on top of the bookshelf. It’s bold, maybe, and she isn’t entirely certain that this is where Katniss wants them, but she wants to make a point all the same.  _ This is your house. These are your books.  _   
  
Katniss takes a step closer, and it’s all she can do not to say,  _ yes,  _ and  _ thank you _ . So she focuses on her books, instead. “My aunt gave me this one, when I said I wanted to be an artist,” she says, pulling one from the top shelf and handing it to Katniss. “It’s drawing exercises. Like you’d get in school.”    
  
She stops herself at five.  _ This one is my favorite world _ .  _ I just read this one last week, it’s about the first revolution, before the second dark days _ .  _ This one is a biography about my favorite artist. I met the author of this one, when she was here a few months ago _ .    
  
“Can I read this one?” asks Katniss, who has slipped a book about the textile industry in District Eight off of the shelf. Peeta can feel her cheeks getting hot. She bought that one not long after she started talking to Katniss.    
  
“You can read anything you want to,” she says. And then -- “I’ll bring you to the Athenaeum, too. You get a free membership, since you’re with me. They have so many books, anything you could ever want to read about.”    
  
She explained the Athenaeum in an early letter to Katniss, along with a brief description of her current project and her initial draft of the Katniss plant. She can tell Katniss remembers, but she’s got her fingers curled so tightly around the book. Like she’ll have to let go of it soon. 

  
“I . . . am gonna make us a cup of tea,” she announces, attempting to ignore the tightening in her chest. “You can unpack if you’d like. Or read, or --” she catches herself short of babbling. “I’m gonna go.”    
  
And then it’s quiet, just for a minute, as Peeta backs out of the room, eyes on Katniss until she has to round the corner. 

 

She’s been planning it -- all of this -- for weeks. The tea she would brew, the crackers she would serve, how much cheese she would cut. A dish of sugarcubes sits on the table, something she got at the thriftyard that may once have been a gravy boat. Though it isn’t exactly a traditional tea setting, she wonders if she should have gotten china, something, anything nicer than the coffee cups she always drinks from when she’s by herself.    
  
But then -- she isn’t by herself. Not anymore. In the drawer of the hall table sits the papers confirming it. They arrived earlier in the week, at Peeta’s first class mail request, all provided by the agency that helps put together potential spouses with registries like the one Peeta wrote her advertisement in. She slipped them from the brown envelope as soon as they arrived, read through every line of fine print, ran her fingers over every embossed government seal, and then slid them back in carefully, where they waited until this afternoon. Just beside it rests a pen -- her best one, the one she wrote letters to Katniss with every Wednesday and Friday -- waiting, ready, for Katniss. 

 

. . .   
  


The tea has gone cold by the time Katniss emerges. And Peeta, of course, has tucked away the marriage license again.    
  
Peeta startles at the sound of her quiet, “Oh.”    
  
She’s been so preoccupied with picking at her cuticles and trying not to wonder why her new wife was hidden away in the bedroom that she didn’t even hear the door open at last. 

 

“Have you been waiting long?” she asks. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting. I just . . .”  She looks apologetic -- at least, Peeta thinks she does, based on what she can see of her eyes -- and says,    
  
The book is still in her hands. Peeta, invested as she was in finding a way to learn what Katniss wasn’t telling her about District Eight, didn’t find the text nearly that engrossing.    
  
“It’s okay!” she says, maybe a bit too eagerly, pushing herself up from her seat so that she can pull Katniss’s out. “I’m going to put the kettle back on -- nothing some hot water can’t fix.”    
  
It’s quiet for a beat, and then Peeta says what she’s been trying to word since they first met,    
  
“You don’t need the mask here.” 

  
No -- that’s what she was trying to avoid, sounding like she was telling her what to do. How could she be trusted, if even the air here is suspicious.    
  
“I mean, if you don’t want it, obviously,” she amends, but then that doesn’t sound strong enough, so she tries one last time. 

 

“I run an air purifier in the apartment,” she clarifies. “And -- even outside, we don’t have big factories. Not like in Eight.”    
  
She turns the kettle off as soon as the light clicks on and circles back to the table to top up Katniss’s mug only to find that she already  _ has  _ taken the mask off, and downed almost all of the now-cold tea to boot. The mask hangs loosely around her neck, and though Peeta has seen her already, has realized that Katniss was pretty _ ,  _ there’s something  _ more  _ about the woman that she’s not quite ready for now that she can fully see her.    
  
She’s almost smiling. Peeta thinks, maybe with a reach it could be called that. Just the corners of her mouth pulling somehow both up and down at the same time in a quivering, half-anxious expression. Not  _ happy _ , maybe, not exactly like she imagined, but amused, at least.    
  
“And, um, you clearly figured that out on your own, already, and I’m just -- ah, just an idiot,” she babbles, and that does it. 

 

Just as Peeta is trying to resign herself to her new fate, one of having a wife who thinks she’s completely stupid, Katniss’s lips pull into a smile. A real one, so genuine that Peeta thinks she might not be aware of it at all   
  
The light from the kitchen window hits her just right -- enough for Peeta to see the faint, dark freckles that dust across her round nose, caught as well in the skin just around it that wrinkles. They’re on her forehead, as well, like they’ve been speckled across her by an artist much, much better than Peeta. 

  
And that  _ something more _ she saw earlier sails right past the realm of  _ pretty _ and makes Peeta try desperately to remember, for a moment, whether heart flutters were on the list of side effects for her newest prescription. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my beta Wooly. 
> 
> Chapter titles and fic title are all Sappho fragments. 
> 
> In this house we respect lesbians.


End file.
